The beauty of nature
The window cleaners are just leaving Helena Christensen’s New York apartment during our WhatsApp call. “Would you hold on for a minute while I pay them?” she asks. “I could not even look out of my windows – they haven’t been cleaned in a year and a half. I’m so excited, it’s so much brighter in here now,” she explains, in a voice brimming with genuine delight.
She can be forgiven for the clouded windows. The model and photographer, who is now more often behind the lens than in front of it, has spent much of the pandemic at her other property in upstate New York, with her son Mingus, 21, and a couple of friends. “It has been a really fortunate situation. The fact that nature was just outside, and we could do treks, cook a lot and feel safe was life-saving, mentally and physically.”
This “yearning for the outdoors”, as she describes it, is a point that Helena keeps coming back to throughout our conversation, and it goes right back to her time as a supermodel in the early 1990s – a period that catapulted her on to the world stage.
Born in Copenhagen to a Danish father and Peruvian mother, Helena started modelling in the late ’80s. In the ’90s she appeared on countless magazine covers and was booked for fashion dubbed Helena, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Elle Macpherson, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer “the Magnificent Seven”. Although she continues to work on shoots and shows, her most notable appearance in the past few years was in 2017, when a group of “supers” reunited in an epic runway tribute to Gianni Versace.
